Benham had called it aristocracy.  But he was far away by now from political aristocracy.

This time he had not begun with definitions and generalizations, but with a curiously subjective appeal.  He had not pretended to be theorizing at large any longer, he was manifestly thinking of his own life and as manifestly he was thinking of life as a matter of difficulty and unexpected thwartings.

“We see life,” he wrote, “not only life in the world outside us, but life in our own selves, as an immense choice of possibilities; indeed, for us in particular who have come up here, who are not under any urgent necessity to take this line or that, life is apparently pure choice.  It is quite easy to think we are all going to choose the pattern of life we like best and work it out in our own way. . . .  And, meanwhile, there is no great hurry. . . .

“I want to begin by saying that choice isn’t so easy and so necessary as it seems.  We think we are going to choose presently, and in the end we may never choose at all.  Choice needs perhaps more energy than we think.  The great multitude of older people we can observe in the world outside there, haven’t chosen either in the matter of the world outside, where they shall go, what they shall do, what part they shall play, or in the matter of the world within, what they will be and what they are determined they will never be.  They are still in much the same state of suspended choice as we seem to be in, but in the meanwhile things happen to them.  And things are happening to us, things will happen to us, while we still suppose ourselves in the wings waiting to be consulted about the casting of the piece. . . .

“Nevertheless this immense appearance of choice which we get in the undergraduate community here, is not altogether illusion; it is more reality than illusion even if it has not the stable and complete reality it appears to have.  And it is more a reality for us than it was for our fathers, and much more a reality now than it was a few centuries ago.  The world is more confused and multitudinous than ever it was, the practicable world far wider, and ourselves far less under the pressure of inflexible moulding forces and inevitable necessities than any preceding generations.  I want to put very clearly how I see the new world, the present world, the world of novel choice to which our youth and inexperience faces, and I want to define to you a certain selection of choices which I am going to call aristocratic, and to which it is our manifest duty and destiny as the elect and favoured sons of our race to direct ourselves.